Eclectic Technology

The Buck Institute for Education (BIE) is a go to site for learning about Problem-Based Learning, and they are offering four free one-week courses during February and March. The courses are:

* How to Create a Driving Question

* How to Manage Student Presentations

* How to Assess Critical Thinking

* How to Include Content and Competencies

You may register for the first two courses now. Registration for the other two will open on Feb. 4, 2015.

Additional information is available on the courses at the website (click through to the course).

There is a maximum enrollment of 300 so if you are interested in checking these out it would be good to go to the website sooner rather than later.

This post by Tony Vincent provides an in-depth look at how to craft driving questions that promote project based learning. It begins with a discussion of why you would choose to use driving questions and then turns to projects and shares what he believes makes a good project, one that will make a "dent" in the world.

Additional areas explored include:

* What comes first,the driving question or the learning goals?

* Who writes the question?

* The many types of driving questions (and the list includes seven categories) as well as resources that will help you craft a driving question.

* Refining the question

* Outcomes

* Branching questions

There are quite a few examples of driving questions provided as well as links to some additional resources.

If you are planning on having project based learning a component of your classroom this post provides great foundational material to help you create a great driving question.

How can we get our students more engaged in the classroom? Teaching them to investigate authentic problems provides them with opportunities to ask questions that will lead to solutions (and failures) but that will also engage them. In this post Tony Vincent shares steps in how to have your students engage in investigating authentic questions.

Vincent starts with a section called Driven to Investigate. In this section he discusses driving questions and references a previous article, Crafting Questions that Drive Projects.

Additional sections (and there are a total of thirteen) include:

* Thinking is Critical

* Stick Together or Divide and Conquer

* Provide Focus

* Provide Staring Points

* Can You  Believe It?

* Experiments, Trial and Error, Data Collection

* You Know Better Than Anyone

Each section is chock full of resources. This is a great resource to help you launch students into investigating authentic problems. He also notes that he will publish Part 3, Creating Products to Show and Share in the future. I will be looking forward to reading (and in all likelihood sharing) that post once it is published.